Microsoft’s New Edge Browser Released, Available for Download

Microsoft has released its Chromium-based Edge browser and is now available for download. This new browser abandons Microsoft’s home-grown EdgeHTML interpreting engine for Google’s open-sourced platform called ‘Chromium’ and the Blink rendering engine, which will add greater characteristic and performance. This first Steady release is Microsoft Edge 79 and can be downloaded right away from the Microsoft Edge site for both Windows and Mac. Otherwise, Microsoft Edge will be installed automatically over the next coming months via Windows Update.

The company’s second browser, Edge, released in July 2015, was an effort by Microsoft to replace Internet Explorer and acquire browser leadership. It didn’t succeed. That version of Edge, available only for Windows 10, was dull, overstuffed with features that few users wanted and badly missing in something users did want: browser extensions. Edge’s failure to ignite only accelerated challenger Chrome’s ascent. According to Statcounter, as of December 2019, Chrome had 69% of the worldwide desktop browser market, compared to 4.6% for Edge and 3.6% for Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s new Edge browser is as impressive as can be imagined from the company’s past. Rather than designing the browser with patented code, Microsoft decided to build the new Edge using open-source Chromium source code, which was originally formed by Google and also supports Google Chrome and other browsers such as Opera and Brave. Doing that is anathema to the go-it-alone-and-dominate-the-market vision championed by past CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

Present Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been preparing to break with that Microsoft orthodoxy in the past. But using open-source code first formed by Google for Microsoft’s new browser is believably his biggest risk so far. Looked at another way, though, it was no venture at all. With Microsoft’s browser market share so marginal and its browsers so widely reviled, he likely felt he had nothing to lose by taking a dramatically new approach.